12vcummins96
lovin those huffers
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2010
- Messages
- 284
Not a stupid question, and you're not overthinking things. First off, you're way ahead of most people who just say "set the secondary at twice the boost of the primary". However, as you know, boost ratios and PR are NOT the same.
I went through this about a year ago as well, with my 62/476 install. It's somewhat hard to find helpful, technically accurate information on tuning twins (at least from what I could find). Nonetheless, here's what I've found out on mine.
You're going about it right, in that you want each turbo to share half of the "work"...and this means running equal PRs. However, from what I've experienced, it's not possible for this to happen in reality. You can adjust the wastegate on the secondary so that PRs on the two turbos match at one condition, but they won't match at any of the other conditions.
Since the secondary begins to spool much faster, its boost climbs quickly to about 10 psi before the primary begins to make a pound or two. The secondary continues to build boost faster, up to the point that its wastegate cracks. When the wastegate opens on the secondary, the primary begins to pick up speed much quicker. This (obviously) is because the primary is now receiving a larger percentage of the exhaust flow, and it's "higher quality" exaust due to the higher temperature of the wastegated exhaust...it is also beginning to get into the mass flow rate of air where it was designed to operate.
Thus, when you reach this point, the primary now begins building boost much quicker than the secondary. As such, neither of the turbos spool linearly with respect to each other. The small one spools quicker at first, and tapers off as the wastegate cracks. The big one is slow at first, and gets a kick in the pants as the secondary's wastegate opens. Because of this non-linearity, I've not found a way to maintain a constant shared PR across the speed/load operating range of the engine.
The best I've been able to do, is to set the wastegate on the secondary such that you are at a 1:1 PR ratio with the two turbos at about 75 - 80% of full horsepower. This allows the small secondary to spool quickly and get you going. At full 100% hp, the primary will be doing more work than it should; however, for daily driving, this has worked better for me. It does make the primary have a higher PR than the secondary at WOT, but it allows the PRs to be more closely matched in the 40 - 75% throttle range where I normally tow/drive/need boost at.
For an all-out-best dyno number, it may be better to match PRs at 100% load, but I've found for a daily driver/work horse, a little lower does better. For what it's worth, with my ~650 hp worth of fueling, the 476 primary never sees much more than 25 psi on a WOT run. Thus, unless you are too heavily fueled for the set of twins you have, I don't think there is much tuning to be done with the wastegate setting on the primary...as long as you aren't letting it crack before 25 or 30 psi and "wasting" exhaust energy.
Again, the above info may or may not be accurate, and may not be the best way of doing things. It's just what I've found to be true with my limited knowledge and my setup.
--Eric
This really helps thank you